If everything starts from a seed, where did the seed come from?

This is a place where I will post random thoughts about whatever comes to mind. Why am I doing this? Could it be that my sister suggested it? Then why did she suggest it? Why at this moment? I imagine it as ripples spreading outward, in this case back into time and from person to event.

That image doesn't suit my sense very well, though, for even though it is linearly correct (time as a linear progression and standard notions of space as 3 dimensions that are causally related) it doesn't allow for all the new understandings that transcend linearity and normal causality.

To be truthful, this is not the best beginning to a blog but it is a random thought and I won't censor it. Just writing anything that is uncensored beats being silent any longer.

It is late in the night and the only sounds are the clatter of the keyboard keys and the wonderful sound of hot air rushing out of the heat vents. Makes me think of how fortunate I am to have a wonderful home and space to be free and safe. There is a cost to it all. What have I given up in doing so ?

This evening I looked up a few people from my past. 25 years have passed and where are they and where am I? We were all on our path to get our Ph.D.s in Astronomy. Such a lofty ideal. For me, it was born as a six year old boy standing outside my childhood home gazing at the sky. I was in love with that sky. For some of my fellow astrophiles that passion and love continues to this day. Or at least I imagine it does since I haven't spoken to them in 25 years and they continue to write research papers on the same topics they did 25 years ago. The spectral analysis of Cassiopeia A ...... The Helmholtz time for the collapse of the sun ....

I could have done that. I never finished my Ph.D . They did. They are astronomers. I am not. Those are the causal ripples I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Small things magnified into larger ones. Butterfly effects of our lives. I became a teacher, an administrator, a Buddhist, a cross cultural translator, and now a papa to a little girl 50 years my junior. What a wonderful web we weave.

I think of Zen mind, Beginner's Mind. All that I am, the many apparent disasters ... not finishing that degree, so many eye problems, divorce, remarriage ... birth of a new life ... so today I am the result of all of that and more that I will never know from my parent, their parents and so on. From Sept. 11, 2001 and a world filled with fear and hope. I am at the same time all of the history, all of the causes and conditions that bring me to this place, and I am nothing more than this moment, as this moment is pristine and innocent. Like my smiling daughter's face. Pure and completely perfect. Absolutely perfect.